Why Jira Sucks

Our folk wisdom metaphors for QA/Test and change management are wrong. Sure, given enough thrust, even pigs can fly. But polish a turd and it's still a turd. [1]

JIRAs turrible implementation isn't even as bad as the CRM, ERP, enterprise products of yore. Turrible, sure. But I've seen worse. Much worse.

[1] I was a QA Manager for a while. Someday I may publish (explain) the play books my teams used for shrink wrapped releases. (Spoiler: I replaced a lot of heavy weight CRUD based mgmt with lightest weight artifacts. Like just printing all the bugs, taped to the wall, and using approval voting to prioritorize.) Until then, Bryzek's new "testing in production" strategy is the only QA/Test workflow that seems directionally correct in our new agile SaaS world.

https://www.infoq.com/podcasts/Michael-Bryzek-testing-in-pro...

My belief from seeing many organizations struggle with Jira is they have process issues that need to be addressed outside of Jira. Jira is simply the place where their process becomes visualized and put into place - so it gets blamed for the breakdowns.

Reading through this list, I can picture exactly why this user is having these complaints. Some of these a definitely UX frustrations, but many of these seem to be fundamental process issues or contradictions. For example, the website claims "missing easy setup" - while also listing a bunch of things that demonstrate the complexity of their Jira setup.

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tldr: If you're having the issues the author lists, you should probably check your process. Jira is doing you the favor of highlighting where it's broken.

The markup you write gets turned into in-editor "objects" (for lack of a better term) as you type it out. This makes editing an incredibly painful experience. I am occasionally asked to document something on Confluence for a client and every time I feel like I am fighting a battle just to make a basic document.

For example, I strongly dislike their implementation of ordered list editing. They have tried to make the ordered list editing mode "smart", but it mostly just gets in the way, and is harder than writing it out manually. Additionally, you cannot embed other "objects" in an ordered list. If you attempt to insert a file object, or something similar, it splits your ordered list into two, with the second list starting its ordering at the beginning. This would seem to defeat the purpose of having a rich editor with embeddable objects, since I cannot use them if I am making an ordered list, such as set of "how to" steps.

I usually give up an hour in and switch to writing in my text editor instead, but even then Confluence will mangle my input in surprising ways when I paste it in. Rule #1 of making an editor in my book is that it has to be, at a minimum, as easy and useful as a basic text editor. Microsoft Word and LibreOffice, in spite of their faults, are quite good at this. I would guess most software shops could not implement a WYSIWYG editor at that level of polish, and they would be better off just providing editable markup.

Jira is middle-management-ware, a term I made up (I think) for software that serves the needs of middle management, or, at least, the needs middle management thinks it has, which comes to the same thing as long as you're selling to them.

What are those needs? Metrics. Being able to see who's doing what, and how quickly, and what still needs to get done. Being able to make charts and graphs and summarized reports for the next-higher level of management, so they can say that their team is productive and their team isn't falling behind.

It also serves the needs of the companies, like Adaptavist, which have attached themselves to Jira to sell add-ons and generally bring the state of the software up to where middle managers (in my experience) think it ought to be out of the box.

I could imply that this is deliberate, that Atlassian is Not Adding some features to scratch the backs of those other companies, but That Would Be Wrong, I'm sure.